RIAA Massively Ramps Up Warning Notices To College Students Over File Sharing

from the last-throes... dept

While the RIAA has been sending threatening notices to colleges about student file sharing for a while now, it seems to have recently stepped up the attack. Various colleges are reporting a rather massive increase in these notices, despite no discernible change in file sharing activity. In some cases, they're suddenly getting as many notices in a day as they used to get in a month. Some universities are also pointing out that they don't see any corresponding activity in their log files that would indicate that industry insiders had actually checked to make sure these files were infringing.

One interesting theory is mentioned in the Wired article above. The RIAA has been using the number of such notices as some sort of indicator of how much piracy is occurring -- and even lobbying for laws that would require any university that got over a certain number of notices to install special filtering/monitoring software. So, by showing an increase, the RIAA can try to show how "necessary" this is, even if the notices are totally bogus. As one person points out in the article, it does not seem at all reasonable to judge how much piracy is occurring (or what actions need to be taken) based on an arbitrary number that is totally under the control of the RIAA.

Re: Some one

Re: Some one

Not sure what you and your commenting buddies are angry about. Is it the legal tactics of the RIAA that has you steamed or is it that the entertainment industry is acting aggressively to defend copyright? Making a digital backup of one's own purchased content for oneself is legal, sharing copies of those works on the internet w/o compensating the copyright owner is not. So what's the problem?

Re: They need to stop!

no more easy street ?

Have they sent any to Harvard yet ? Gutless wonders.
Yeah, looks like the schoolyard bully picking on the easy targets.
The RIAA has had their asses handed to them by several institutions of higher learning. Have they gone back for more ? See how they are avoiding those that defend themselves ?

My school

I work as a network tech for my school (U of I at Urbana) and my school's IT department got an increase from roughly 2 a week to 100 a day for a bout a week. Our job lately has been to tell the other students how to deal with the subsequent shut-offs, and to be honest its extremely annoying. I'd much rather fix people's computers and network problems (our real job) rather than tell half my dorm what they did; it's a heck of a lot more interesting.

I do not doubt they are doing this as a way to show how important it is to combat the "piracy" that is going on. It's gotten to the point where our overarching campus IT guys are overwhelmed (where people get shut off, go through the process, get turned back on, and then get turned off again within 10 mins because of a subsequent request that they didn't get to because of the backlog.) and frankly its rather ridiculous.

It almost makes me want to go and fire up Limewire for the first time in 3 years.

RIAA turning into Spammer?

With all the notices going out, and as indicated in the article the numbers are totally in the control of the RIAA, does this mean that they could be held liable as a spammer because of the flood of messages that are bogus and specifically for their own personal gains as SPAM is created to do?

How many colleges are there?

How many colleges and universities are there? A few thousand? How many RIAAs are there? One. Hmmmm. Seems to me that if the colleges and universities would get together, a fairly small contribution from each could fund a LOT of opposition to the RIAA. Sort of like a SLAPP in reverse.